A global consumer electronics major was looking to enhance business agility, improve visibility of their supply chain, better manage inventory, and increase collaboration across sales, supply chain, and merchandising teams. Using a practical Lean DigitalSM approach, the company implemented an integrated business planning solution along with an advanced visualization and forecasting solution to improve forecasting accuracy by 32% and employee productivity by 22%, at the same time enhancing decision-making capabilities and catalyzing growth.

Business challenge

A leading consumer electronics company was struggling with inadequate visibility into their manufacturing and fulfilment processes. Moreover, the fact that existing systems were unable to capture and utilize retailer point of sale (PoS) data hindered the company’s ability to model demand forecasting—and this lack of insight resulted in demand and inventory mismatches, higher working capital costs, and sub-optimal productivity. Additionally, the company’s fragmented processes for PSI and promotional planning were creating critical misalignments between inventory levels and promotional campaigns.

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The company required an integrated view of production, inventory, fulfilment, and sales across global operations, enabling agile responses to changing market needs

Genpact solution

The way forward was to reimagine the siloed, fragmented processes to drive end-to-end visibility through streamlined processes augmented by agile technology, actionable analytics, global delivery, and continuous learning.

Design thinking methods focused on the end customer to reimagine outcomes

Value-discovery workshops with the client and their business partners, as well as the analysis of use cases across industries, pointed the way to the ideal state solution design

Improving forecast accuracy was determined to be a revenue driver, and an automated forecasting engine was identified as an immediate priority for enhancing the sales force’s client management capabilities

Limited collaboration and visibility across sales, supply chain, and merchandizing functions—which previously had resulted in sub-optimal decision-making as well as productivity losses due to rework—were identified as key areas for improvement

Underpinned by domain expertise

A custom big data engine which enables organic data governance to be embedded into design and creates a “single version of the truth” for all forecasting needs, provided increased accuracy in forecasting models, with enhanced usability, in real time

Genpact set up managed services for the client for forecasting and analyzing 6,000 demand-forecasting units, enabling the client to capture seasonal and intermittent demand variations, reduce forecast errors, and create better inventory plans

The way forward was to reimagine the siloed, fragmented processes to drive end-to-end visibility through streamlined processes augmented by agile technology, actionable analytics, global delivery, and continuous learning

Lean principles that focus on agility

Lean principles guided the process re-design, supported managed services set-up, and led to several process streams being standardized, consolidated, and centralized

Retailer PoS data served as the input for exception-management and scenario-development processes to generate sell-through-driven forecast enabled by an integrated business planning solution

These models also enabled the client to continuously update the analysis, with the inputs for one cycle establishing baseline metrics and improvement targets for the next cycle